Where does the word love come from?
Half our words for love began as words for foolishness and suffering. Even love itself is a cousin of libido and, stranger still, of belief.
The word love comes from the Old English lufu, from an ancient root, leubh-, meaning “to care for, to desire, to hold dear.” That root travelled widely: it is a cousin of the Latin libido, “desire,” and, more surprisingly, of the English believe, which once meant to hold something dear enough to trust it. But the real surprise is not where love came from. It is the company the word keeps, because English quietly treats love as a kind of pleasant madness.
The words that mean foolish
Look at how we describe someone in love and you keep meeting old words for a fool. To be fond of someone once meant, flatly, to be foolish about them: fond is the past participle of a lost verb fonnen, “to be a fool.” To dote on someone is, at the root, to be silly or feeble-minded, the same word that sits inside dotage. And to be infatuated comes straight from the Latin infatuare, “to make a fool of,” from fatuus, “foolish,” the very word that also gives us fatuous. Three of our warmest words for devotion are, underneath, three ways of calling someone an idiot.
The words that mean suffering
The grander word is worse. A passion sounds like love at its height, but it comes from the Latin passio, “suffering,” from pati, “to suffer, to endure.” It is the same word as the Passion of Christ, meaning his suffering, and it is first cousin to patient, one who endures, to passive, one who is acted upon, and to compassion, “suffering with.” To be passionate, at the root, is not to feel strongly. It is to suffer.
The words that mean hunger
Where love shades into wanting, the words turn to appetite. Cupid, the cherub with the arrows, is simply the Latin cupido, “desire,” from cupere, “to want,” and the same root hands us cupidity, which means greed, and covet, which the commandments take a dim view of. In Latin, desire and greed were only a short step apart.
The word that means for free
Set against all that fever, one love word stays innocent. From the Latin amare, “to love,” English quietly built the amateur, the person who does a thing purely for love and not for money. It is the last clean word in the pile: love as the reason you do something for nothing.
Which is, oddly, where the story ends up. In tennis, a score of nothing is called love, and nobody is entirely sure why. Some say it comes from the French l’oeuf, “the egg,” because a zero is egg-shaped, the way cricket calls a nought a duck. Others say it is the old phrase to play for love, meaning to play for nothing, no stakes and no money. The honest answer is that we do not know. But either way, the one place love means zero is the one place it costs you nothing.
So the true history of the word is not romantic at all. English half-remembers that love is a folly you suffer from, a hunger dressed up as a virtue, and the one thing still worth doing for free. Every love word turns out to be a small verdict on what the feeling actually does to us, and once you hear it, you cannot stop. We say we are fond, and passionate, and infatuated, and each time, quietly, we are confessing that we have taken leave of our senses.
The Monthly Lemma follows one everyday word a month all the way back to its root, then posts the whole story to your door. One word, and the world behind it.
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